Doors in Portugal

In June, I had the opportunity to make a brief visit to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Most of my time there was spent in a sleepy village on the outskirts of the capital, amidst the rolling hills covered with olive trees. 

This was my first visit to Portugal, although I feel as though I have encountered the broad influence of Portugal many times in my travels. This is especially the case in former Portuguese colonies that retain the Portuguese language, including Brazil and Mozambique, as well as Angola (which I have not visited). Yet I have also felt Portuguese influence in places as diverse as Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Benin, Malaysia, South Africa, China, and Sri Lanka, where various family and city names, as well as the presence of the Catholic Church, reveals a distant influence of Europe's first great colonial power. 

Portugal today is a relatively small nation of 10.5 million on the western edge of Europe, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Spain. For centuries now, it has been rather distant from the centers of European power further north. Yet at one time, Portugal was among the most powerful nations on earth, launching the age of exploration in the fifteenth century with exploration of the West African coast and later Brazil, southern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India, and Southeast Asia. 

Although Portugal's greatest colony, Brazil, became independent in the early nineteenth century, Portuguese colonial power remained in Angola, Mozambique, several smaller African nations, the city-state of Goa in India, and the city-state of Macau in China into the late twentieth century. The independence of East Timor in 2002 brought an end to the Portuguese colonial empire that began in the fifteenth century. Today, Portugal is rather dwarfed in the Portuguese-speaking world by its giant protégé, Brazil, with a population of 200 million. 

Most of my time in Portugual was spent in a rather sleepy village on the edge of Lisbon, surrounded by rolling hills and olive trees. The following are a few photos of that small village of São Antão de Tojal. 

A view of São Antão de Tojal

An old fountain beneath a viaduct

The same viaduct on the city's main street

The village church

A Return to Africa - Abidjan

The following was written in June of this year during a visit to Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire, when the story of ebola in West Africa was still a very minor story at the bottom of the international news. If you have not read David Brooks' recent op-ed in the New York Times on that subject, I strongly recommend it. 

*****

My first experience of sub-Saharan Africa north of the Limpopo River was a small and incredibly stuffy pre-immigration "holding room" in the airport in Lomé, the capital of Togo in West Africa. This experience of an hour or so introduced me to many of the less pleasant aspects of travels in Africa. After the long and disorderly queues, the repeated checks of vaccination records, the stuffy environment, the mosquitoes, and the assumption that everyone speaks French well, I stood before the immigration officer who slowly and with a slightly detached air checked and rechecked my passport. After she affixed the requisite stamps, she handed me my passport. Upon making eye contact as she handed me my passport, her eyes brightened, and she said, seemingly with all sincerity, "thank you for visiting our country." I puzzled over that at the time, and to a degree continue to puzzle. I was hardly the only foreigner or the only American on that AirFrance planeload arriving from Paris. She was hardly wowed by my incredibly poor French. I hardly looked nice after a 24-hour journey across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Sahara. It seems, after many more visits across this vast and diverse continent (some including distinctly less pleasant immigration or emigration experiences!), I would still say that that experience sums up many of my experiences in Africa. 

Africa, like much of the world, is portrayed in the United States as a land of poverty, conflict, violence, and disorder. All of that is true, in part. It is also true of most other places in the world. From the recent coverage of the (undeniably awful) violence of Boko Haram in Nigeria, one would think that Nigeria barely functions as a country, when in reality most of its citizens continue to lead their economic, social, and spiritual lives productively on a daily basis. The Africa that appears in so many western newscasts is real, but is a small part of the daily life of Africa. The same could be said of many of the promotional materials of many western NGOs active in Africa. A common underlying theme seems to be that Africa is a continent without hope, a continent somehow almost outside of history, in need of interventions to save it from itself. These "interventions" have at times taken the almost society-wide form of colonialism, while more recently I have seen them more in the form of "aid" projects, including many Christian aid projects, that seek to somehow meet "Africa's needs" one drip at a time.

This "intervention" approach, in my opinion, fails to give enough credit to African people, who, despite challenging circumstances, are a phenomenally creative lot.  I see this especially in the African evangelical churches, or at least in the swath of this vast and diverse movement that I engage with. For many years, these relatively young churches adopted a thinking very similar to many churches in the West that stressed personal salvation and the life of the church within the walls of the church with relatively little focus on what faith meant outside the walls of the church in daily life. Although I'm far from an expert in African culture, the history of African churches, or African theology, I have always felt that this rather limited understanding of Christianity seemed out of tune with the realities of Africa. Africa, it seems to me, is a very holistic place that seems to have an almost natural aversion to the dichotomy of the spiritual and the social that has bedeviled many Protestant movements in the west and elsewhere. Over the past ten years, I have seen this commitment to holistic mission grow. A recent meeting in Abidjan included numerous expressions of a sense that society was looking to the church for answers to persistent questions and that the church was looking to be more active in addressing these questions. This takes a number of forms, from the formation of Christian universities across the continent, to a commitment to theological education that is more responsive. 

Africa's great strength is her people. Just as I was blessed by the Togolese lady's smile on my first visit, I continue to be blessed by Africans day by day. 

Bishkek - A City of Stories

Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan, is a rather dusty, low-hanging city. I've heard it called Almaty's little sister. Certainly, it has resemblance. Both sit beneath imposing and breathtaking mountain vistas (if anything, Bishkek may edge out her bigger sister in this competition). But Bishkek has not seen the proliferation of highways and skyscrapers that have resulted from the economic development in Kazakhstan. Bishkek retains the feel of the provincial Soviet city it once was. 

Monument to Manas, a hero of an ancient Kyrgyz poem

To the Fighters of the Revolution - Central Bishkek

Yet central Bishkek must be one of the finest collections of Soviet-era architecture, with examples ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s. I have always been fascinated by and admired Soviet architecture and urban planning. Since Bishkek is a relatively young city, founded only at the end of the nineteenth century, early Soviet planners had a bit more free reign to design than did those in some older cities. The entire downtown area is a succession of squares sprawling along wide avenues. Nearly all of these squares center on a grand monument:  monuments to semi-mythical ancient Kyrgyz heroes, a monument to the "voluntary" uniting of the Kyrgyz lands to Russia in the nineteenth century, monuments to the victors of the October Revolution and of World War II, and monuments to various writers, thinkers, and musicians (Russian and Kyrgyz). One of the more interesting monuments is dedicated to a Kyrgyz ballet dancer who was named a Peoples' Artist of the USSR. Unlike most former Soviet cities, Lenin still stands in a central square, as does a statue of Marx and Engels in full nineteenth-century garb engaged in intense discussion. 


The Soviets used city planning to tell a story. This was almost always a story of progress and moving into the bright future. Lenin always stands with his hand extended, showing the way into the future. Other leaders are depicted walking out onto a point, as if treading into uncertain but promising waters. War monuments invariably show men, women, children, and often animals struggling toward a summit where a final figure raises their hand in triumph. Such stories dominate the center of nearly every post-Soviet city. More recent monuments honor national heroes (such as the various monuments to Manas in Bishkek, Tamerlane in Tashkent, or Bohdan Khmelnitsky in Kyiv. Monuments to various Tsars have reappeared in St. Petersburg in the past 25 years. Most cities have some more recent monument to those who led uprisings leading to the independence of various republics, or to the suffering they felt during the Soviet period, such as the monument to the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine) in Kyiv. While the Soviet-era stories were almost always kept harmonious, the post-Soviet landscape has often become a bit dissonant, with various historical narratives jostling up against one another in a tune that doesn't quite match. Yet I value the fact that the leaders of city like Bishkek tolerate that dissonance, as history in reality is nothing if not dissonant. 

Monument to a Kyrgyz ballet dancer who found pan-Soviet fame

There is a part of me that loves the grand use of space to tell a story. While the Mall in Washington has elements of this city-as-story, the US has generally not used urban planning to tell stories as much as European city planners (and especially Soviet ones) have. Although much of the ideology and historiography behind these grand Soviet monuments is now thoroughly discredited, these stones still stand as a reminder of a path humanity has walked. In many ways, it seems that people here and in many other places are in some way hungry for grand narratives and purposes. In our increasingly disconnected lives, perhaps we do look for something that gives meaning, that joins us together. Such a hunger is probably a very good thing, a natural and necessary corrective in a time that has probably become a bit too individualistic. Yet as both Soviet and post-Soviet monuments remind us, this hunger for narrative and purpose can be very dangerous.